Aerial Bold

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Date

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Summary

Aerial Bold was born out of Benedikt's and Joey's love of aerial imagery. They had the idea to find letters from aerial imagery. From all the letters, I created a font with the best-looking and intriguing shapes.
The font comes in three weights, and every weight exists of 26 letters, ten numbers and some punctuation.

Benedikt and Joey launch the project on Kickstarter

Benedikt Groß and Joseph Lee worked together on the Big Atlas of LA Pools, where they visualized the pools in Los Angeles. Their newest project is to search the world for letterforms in satellite imagery. They founded a Kickstarter project, and asked their backers to help finding letterforms.

The typography is unique through its reference to the satellite imagery, which has never done before.

Section of the automated catalog with 10,000 letterforms

With the letter hunt, we collected over ten thousand letterforms. I helped Benedikt creating a 160+ page catalog, which holds all the digits being found. With the catalog of the letter hunt, I was asked to create a working typography out of them.

The typography is unique through its reference to the satellite imagery, which has never done before. Three different themes were found and fitting images were found from all the letterforms. In that way the alphabet exists of every letter, with an illustration of a building, suburban sprawl, or trees.

My first sketches to create abstract letterformsPrinting the satellite imagery for the first selectionPrototypes with measurements and notes

By drawing the letterforms in Illustrator, the details are sharpened and the character is preserved well.

The final Aerial Bold Building; the details are roof panels or ventilatorsThe final Aerial Bold Provence: mostly trees in FranceThe final Aerial Bold Suburbia: sections of the urban sprawl and its citizens